Category: Arts & Culture

How do our stories transform as they are passed down to each generation? Prize-winning poet Su Cho explores the legacies of language and lore in her unforgettable debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish. Selected by Space Struck author Paige Lewis for the National Poetry Series, these poems trace the narratives and phrases of a Korean American immigrant family with absorbing tenderness and curiosity. Cho threads stories of food and folktales through her meditations on joy, grief, friendship, faith, and coming of age in the middle of nowhere. This inventive debut illuminates how language is not lost over generations but distilled into potency— continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew. 

In this conversation, Su Cho discusses her debut collection and the emerging tradition of Korean-American poetry.

Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish casts such corpuscles of light to the Korean and Korean American imagination. Cho’s poems invoke the tongue’s memory to give language to the unnamable: 가시, 밤, 쌀, 살, 사랑니, 봉숭아. Lightness and stillness expand with each word—and from every malady emerges a cure. —E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others and A Lesser Love

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Speaker:

Su Cho is a poet and essayist born in South Korea and raised in Indiana. She has an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University and a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has served as the editor-in-chief of Indiana Review, Cream City Review and has served as guest editor for Poetry magazine. Her work has been featured in Poetry, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and Orion; the 2021 Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies; and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Poetry Fellowship, recipient of a National Society of Arts and Letters Award, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently an assistant professor at Clemson University.

“Lee Geum-yi has a gift for taking little-known embers of history and transforming them into moving, compelling, and uplifting stories. I loved Willow from the first page to the last. Loved her courage, and her tenacious, yet caring, beautiful soul. The Picture Bride is the ultimate story of the power of friendship—a must read!” — Heather Morris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Three Sisters

While reading a book on Korean-American immigration history, Lee Geum-yi stumbled across a photo of three picture brides – young women who left their homes in Korea to marry men whom they knew nothing about. Of the three, only one had a name listed, and there was no information about them. With no record of their lives before or after the photograph, she was seized by an inconsolable desire to bring these women—stuck permanently in a black-and-white photo—back to life. From this desire, Lee Geum-yi’s The Picture Bride was born.

Set in 1918, The Picture Bride follows the journeys of three young women: Willow, who comes from a family of Korean independence activists; Hongju, whose husband died two months into marriage; and Songhwa, who was ridiculed by the children in her village, just for being a shaman’s granddaughter. Unfortunately, the social standing of these three women, who left their country and families with dreams of a new world, doesn’t change much in Hawaii. Yet, through the power of friendship and found family, they forge ahead, creating a new kind of American dream.

The Picture Bride is a celebration of immigrant visionaries, adventurers and trailblazers; a beautiful tale of the power or selfless love; and a thought-provoking story that invites important conversations on colonialism and cultural identity. Perhaps put best by Lee Geum-yi, who hopes this story will find resonance with readers today:

Stories of these three immigrant women, I believe, will deeply resonate with American readers today. … I sincerely hope that all of those who find The Picture Bride will find a piece of their own story in this book.

In this episode of Author Talks, Lee Geum-yi discusses her career in Korea and her English debut.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Speaker:

Lee Geum-yi was born in 1962, in her grandmother’s house in a small, mountainous village in Chungcheongbuk-do, Korea. She became enthralled with the charms of storytelling early on, having spent her childhood under the influence of her grandmother’s bedtime stories. Since then, Lee has published over fifty books in South Korea, and her work has been translated around the world. Beloved by readers and literary critics alike, many of her books have been adapted into TV series, musicals, and webtoons. Lee Geum-yi lives in Seoul, South Korea, with her husband, son, and her old rescue dog, Lulu. The Picture Bride is her first novel to be translated into English.